On one of Type Around Town’s Kolkata bus photographs, destination and route lettering stays attached to the vehicle: windows, passengers and the street remain in the frame. The letters have a shape, but they also belong to something moving through the city.
At Barkat Ali & Bros, the relationship changes. English and Bengali lettering occupies the fascia of the business it identifies. The type is no longer moving through Kolkata; it sits on a fixed commercial frontage.
At Birkmyre Hostel & Club, the surface becomes harder to ignore. Its institutional name is incised into a weathered plaque, where depth, cracks and wear remain visible with the letters. At Metro, the carrier changes again: the illuminated venue name becomes sign, light and part of the cinema facade.
These differences are central to what Type Around Town makes available to see.
Kwazi Design says the project developed through repeated observation and photography around Kolkata. It does not present the collection as a systematic survey, and Kwazi explicitly acknowledges that its selections are shaped by its own values and aesthetics. Type Around Town is an authored visual documentary, not a comprehensive account of the city’s typography.
That distinction leaves the photographs free to do something more specific. Bengali-script and Latin or English lettering appear across the project, sometimes together on the same surface, without needing to stand in for Kolkata’s wider linguistic landscape. What the images establish more directly is physical and functional: what carries the lettering, what it is doing there, and what remains visible around it.
The 2026 Kolkata Edition offers a second view.
Its designed pages sometimes lift selected forms from their original surroundings and organise them for graphic comparison. The Kolkata taxi makes that shift particularly clear. In situ, TAXI and NO REFUSAL sit on the yellow vehicle body. Once elements from that material are isolated in the publication, the reader can inspect the forms more directly.
The two views reveal different things. Isolation makes comparison easier; the street photograph shows what the letters belong to.
That movement sharpens the way Type Around Town can be read. A bus puts typography in motion. A shopfront makes it business identity. A plaque makes material and weathering visible. A cinema facade gives it light and architectural scale.
Look at the letters, but also at the object doing the carrying and the surroundings that remain with it.
Sometimes the carrier and setting are part of what there is to notice.